Christianity and Islam in Spain (756-1031) eBook

[1] The councils are full
of denunciations aimed at the rebels
against the king’s authority.
By the Fourth Council (633) the
deposed Swintila was excommunicated.

[2] Appendix B.

CHAPTER II.

TheSaracensinSpain.

The Gothic domination lasted 300 years, and in that
comparatively short period we are asked by some writers
to believe that the invaders quite lost their national
characteristics, and became, like the Spaniards, luxurious
and effeminate.[1] Their haughty exclusiveness, and
the fact of their being Arians, may no doubt have
tended to keep them for a time separate from, and
superior to, the subject population, whom they despised
as slaves, and hated as heretics. But when the
religious barrier was removed, the social one soon
followed, and so completely did the conquerors lose
their ascendency, that they even surrendered their
own Teutonic tongue for the corrupt Latin of their
subjects.

But the Goths had certainly not become so degenerate
as is generally supposed. Their Saracen foes
did not thus undervalue them. Musa ibn Nosseyr,
the organiser of the expedition into Spain, and the
first governor of that country under Arab rule, when
asked by the Khalif Suleiman for his opinion of the
Goths, answered that “they were lords living
in luxury and abundance, but champions who did not
turn their backs to the enemy."[1] There can be no
doubt that this praise was well deserved. Nor
is the comparative ease with which the country was
overrun, any proof to the contrary. For that must
be attributed to wholesale treachery from one end
of the country to the other. But for this the
Gothic rulers had only themselves to blame. Their
treatment of the Jews and of their slaves made the
defection of these two classes of their subjects inevitable.

The old Spanish chroniclers represent the fall of
the Gothic kingdom as the direct vengeance of Heaven
for the sins of successive kings;[2] but on the heads
of the clergy, even more than of the king, rests the
guilt of their iniquitous and suicidal policy towards
the Arians[3] and the Jews. The treachery of
Julian,[4] whatever its cause, opened a way for the
Arabs into the country by betraying into their hands
Ceuta, the key of the Straits. Success in their
first serious battle was secured to them by the opportune
desertion from the enemy’s ranks of the disaffected
political party under the sons of the late king Witiza,[5]
and an archbishop Oppas, who afterwards apostatized;
while the rapid subjugation of the whole country was
aided and assured by the hosts of ill-used slaves
who flocked to the Saracen standards, and by the Jews[6]
who hailed the Arabs as fellow-Shemites and deliverers
from the hated yoke of the uncircumcised Goths.